


Out of the Wastelands

by Sholio



Category: The Punisher (TV 2017)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Post-Apocalypse, Developing Friendships, F/M, First Aid, Gen, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-16
Updated: 2019-05-16
Packaged: 2020-03-06 13:38:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,238
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18852172
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: Apocalypse survivor Frank finds his way to the Lieberman homestead.





	Out of the Wastelands

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Edonohana](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Edonohana/gifts).



Keep moving, Frank told himself. It was the mantra he lived by; it was why he was still alive. Even at times like this, when all he could manage was putting one foot in front of the other, again and again. In the wilderness, to stop was to die.

Keep moving. Push away pain, push away discomfort. Just keep going.

It was thirst that managed, finally, to penetrate his haze of mechanical movement. Frank found a tree, or more like the tree found him, and he leaned on it and fumbled out his canteen, almost dropping it. Nothing left but dregs. The other was just as bad. He drained what was left. Finding fresh water ... another thing to deal with. 

One thing at a time. That was all he could deal with right now. He checked the angle of the sun: low. Shelter was the most important thing. Water later. After that ... he didn't know. Couldn't think that far ahead. 

He desperately wanted to lie down, but he had a feeling that if he did it now, he wouldn't be getting up again. There was going to come a time, he knew, when he'd pushed himself so far that his body just stopped. He wasn't sure, at times, why he kept pushing it at all. Maybe he was too stubborn to quit.

He stood for a minute in the patch of late spring sunshine, collecting what was left of his strength. The woods were green, the winter past, but the nights were still sharply cold. And night meant ... other things. Worse things. Things that prowled under the cover of darkness.

There was a heaviness in the air, and dark clouds massing on the horizon. Not enough to obscure the sun, not yet. But he thought there was rain coming. Gonna storm tonight.

Got to find somewhere to take shelter.

He checked to make sure he'd put the canteen back, and checked his weapons by habit. Gun, gun. Knife, knife. Not that the guns were much use without ammo.

No food either; he'd given the last of _that_ to that squatter family in the cabin with the baby -- was it two days ago? Three? Before the bandits attacked ...

He realized that he'd zoned out again, leaning on the tree. He took a breath, gathering himself, and with that breath came something he hadn't noticed before: a hint of woodsmoke.

Frank gripped the Glock by habit, then let it go and grasped his big knife instead. Smoke could mean bandits. It could also mean a homestead, even one of the little townlike enclaves he'd heard were more common here, in the greener lands farther from the destroyed cities. 

Though just because people lived out here, didn't mean they'd be friendly to someone who came wandering in from the outside. He'd found _that_ out the hard way, too.

But it might be better than spending the night in the woods.

He gathered himself, pushed away from the tree, and stumbled on.

By the time he found his way to the edge of the woods, following the elusive scent of smoke, the sun was winking through the trees and he'd started to fall down. He fell down for the final time, crawled to the edge of the woods, and lay under a tangle of overgrown brush cascading over what might have once been a piece of rusted farm equipment. Unmoving, he studied the farm with a tactician's eye.

It was a nice-looking little spread, a one-family homestead. There was a farmhouse and a long, low barn, some fields and an extensive vegetable garden, a cow or two grazing outside. The place looked tidy and well cared for. These people were doing pretty well for themselves.

And as you usually found in successful homesteads, there were defenses: in this case, a high and sturdy-looking fence, chain link with barbed wire on top. Might be electrified; hard to tell from here. Frank studied the top of the fence, found cameras and what might even be motion sensors around the gate.

Yeah, these people were careful. _Not_ the sort who'd look kindly on a disreputable, armed traveler stumbling out of the woods, no matter what shape he was in.

Maybe he could sneak in tonight, sleep in a shed, move on at dawn. At the very least, he could get drinkable water from the horse trough, maybe find something to catch rain in.

And then he'd go. Keep moving. Find whatever was out there to find. Survive a little longer.

But he didn't have to move yet, and he was grateful for that. He lay under the bush and watched a woman with a dark red-blonde braid come out of the barn, carrying an armload of hay. She shouted across the yard, and a boy and a girl appeared from behind the house. The boy reached the woman first, who deposited the hay into his arms and then ruffled his hair while he twisted away with the universal body language of all preteens receiving unwanted parental affection.

A part of Frank that he'd thought long dead -- that he'd _hoped_ was dead -- twisted in pain, and he looked away. When he looked back, the woman and the boy had vanished from sight. The girl was out in the pasture, driving the cows toward the barn with whistles and taps on the flank from a stick she carried.

Frank propped his head on his fist, and waited for dark.

 

***

 

The evening routine began with shutting up the livestock in their heavily reinforced barn, and tonight, to Sarah's annoyance, they were being difficult. Most nights the cows and horses, the chickens and goats (refugees, all of them, like their owners -- rescued from abandoned farms, and the descendants of those rescuees) went into the barn on their own, used to the nightly routine and ready for their dinner.

But then you had evenings like this one, when one of the cows had strayed, and the horses were restless and anxious, and several of the chickens couldn't be found. Sarah found herself keeping a close eye on the sky, watching darkness creeping up the horizon. The lights on the fence made her jump when they came on, and it bothered her knowing they were running down the farm's solar-charged batteries unnecessarily, keeping it light for the kids to hunt for missing chickens. It wasn't that the dark was necessarily _that_ much more dangerous than the light; it was just that darkness hid all kinds of things, bandits and wild animals and the strange, mutated monsters that crept through the trees. And they didn't have enough power to leave the lights on all night, as much as she wanted to. The night was so _very_ dark here, away from the city lights she'd grown up with.

There were times when she absolutely hated living out here, when she desperately missed the routines of suburbia and a life when the worst thing she had to deal with on a regular basis was having to put gas in the car.

A block of light appeared as the farmhouse door opened. "Need help?" David called.

"We're good!" she called back. "Kids, that's enough, let's go in. Your father has dinner on the table."

"But!" came from two separate directions, where Zach and Leo had split up to hunt for missing chickens. The kids seemed to relish life on the farm, but then, it was all they'd ever known; even Leo barely remembered life Before. It was the adults who had to carry the burden, Sarah thought, of remembering the world as it used to be, when things just _worked,_ when you turned on the light switch without having to think about batteries and saving power, when running water and refrigeration were ordinary parts of everyday life rather than luxuries you knew better than to take for granted. The kids were good at this life, and comfortable with it, in a way that she would never be.

Thinking about that made her irritable and tense, as did the restlessness of the animals. A wind swirled through the chain links of the fence surrounding their compound, ruffling the pasture grass and whipping her hair around, and she wondered if the animals' jumpiness was because there was a storm on the way. Hopefully it was nothing worse than that.

She shifted the weight of the rifle on her back, and snapped, "I said it's time to go in. We're using power out here, and dinner's getting cold. Forget the last chickens, they'll just have to manage. Let's get ourselves inside."

She felt better with both the farmhouse doors locked and barred. David said there was nothing on the security cameras, and no need to keep a lookout tonight. They settled in for the evening routine: dinner first, then lessons for the kids, Zach in a math workbook they'd borrowed from the Rutherfords (with the Rutherfords' daughter's answers erased out), and Leo in David's computer-cave in the basement, text-chatting with their neighbor Maisie, who had been an astrophysicist Before and was now giving Leo her physics and science lessons.

Sarah was still vastly proud of David for what he'd accomplished with the communication system in the valley. When they'd first come here, they had been like everyone else, ragtag survivors fleeing the city and finding protected enclaves in which to survive. She didn't know, would never know, who had owned this farm before they'd lived here, and that still bothered her sometimes. But over the last few years she and David had made it prosper, and he'd thrown his tech skills into using salvaged computers and old-style analog telephone equipment to get the scattered survivors in the valley in communication with each other and with the outside world. These days, they had telephones and their own private intranet with email and a community message board, plus radio and limited telephone contact with nearby enclaves around them. These days they were even getting close to having reliable 'round-the-clock power, between the solar panels, generators running on scavenged diesel, and a new hydroelectric project that the neighbors in a nearby enclave were setting up.

But the habit of saving power was well ingrained by now, so by nine p.m. she was chasing the kids off the computer, shutting down lights around the house, and getting everyone ready for bed.

"Can I keep watch tonight, Mom? I'm really good with a gun, you know I am!"

"No one is keeping watch, Leo. We're not in any trouble." The kids seemed to view bandit and beast attacks as grand adventures, not the stomach-knotting sources of terror that still haunted Sarah. Maybe she and David had done too good a job of keeping them safe here, untouched by the tragedies that had struck some of the other families in the valley. And they were too young to remember the wars, or the desperate flight from the city, in all but the vaguest terms -- a fairytale before bedtime, not the source of nightmares that it was for their parents.

But if the children felt safe, that meant she and David had succeeded, she reminded herself as she kissed them good night.

When she'd seen them tucked in safely and securely in bed, she went around the house making sure all the shutters were closed and latched, and then checked in on David in the basement computer cave, lit only by the few screens that were still on. With the sun down, the solar panels weren't doing much, so most of it was powered down except the security cameras.

"Quiet night?" she asked, leaning over to rub his shoulders.

"Mostly." He touched the view on one of the cameras, showing the inside of the barn. "Horses are still a little stirred up for some reason. No word from the neighbors on any kind of trouble, though."

"They were flighty when we put them up tonight, too. Someone hanging around, maybe?" she asked, draping her arms over his shoulders. "Bad weather coming?"

"No way to tell. They don't seem scared, just restless." 

"I should do a quick check before bed."

He tilted his head back, smiling up at her. "Be careful out there. Want me to come?"

"I'd rather have you watching my back from down here. Anyway," she added, dropping a quick kiss on the corner of his mouth, "we both know I'm a better shot."

"Not gonna argue with that. Don't forget the walkie-talkie."

"Will do." She kissed him again and climbed the stairs. There was a rifle and shotgun beside each door, as well as the walkie-talkies in their basket by the kitchen door, running on precious scavenged batteries from a fast-dwindling supply. David had set them up so he had a receiver base station in the basement, run off house power rather than the increasingly rare dry-cell batteries. Sarah took one of them, slung a rifle over her shoulder, and let herself out into the night, locking the door behind her.

These days, this far from where the cities used to be, there were times when you could almost imagine the world had changed little from how it used to be in her childhood. You could see the stars again, and the moon. The air smelled clean; there was no need for masks outside, and during the day, it was safe enough to travel that she occasionally even sent the kids on errands to the neighbors alone, as long as they didn't stray and were back by dark.

But there was still a nervous tension when she was outside at night, even here inside the perimeter fence where nothing had ever attacked them.

She walked the length of the fence. There were gaps in David's camera coverage, and she paid special attention to those -- which was how, in one of those dead zones, she found a disturbed place in the fence.

Heart pounding, Sarah crouched and pulled at the edge of the wire. It came up easily. Most of the fence was sunk in concrete, but parts of it were merely buried with stones on top, and this was one of those places. She could see by the way the wire was bent that it had been pulled up, then reburied so it looked undisturbed. Recent, from the freshness of the disturbed earth.

She stood up quickly, slinging the rifle off her shoulder and swinging it down for business. She reached for the walkie-talkie.

"David, are you there? We might have an intruder."

His voice came back immediately. "Human?"

"I don't know. I think so." There were rumors that some of the beasts in the wastelands, the mutated and modified ones, had human-level intelligence. She didn't know how true it was. Whatever had crawled under the fence couldn't be too large, though. Human-sized or smaller.

"Do you want --"

"No. Stay where you are."

"I'll send a drone, then. Don't go anywhere 'til it gets there."

She wasn't going to argue; any backup was better than none. The drones, like the batteries for the walkie-talkies, were a resource that had to be carefully hoarded, but David had several of them, and used them periodically for scouting in the area.

The drone that skimmed across the grass toward her a few minutes later, she was unsurprised to see, was one of their two salvaged battle drones. Sarah hated having them around, knowing what they could do -- what they had done, in the wars of the past. She vastly preferred the unarmed camera 'bots. But they had their uses, and with the drone hovering a few yards away from her, she felt a little safer as she started patrolling again.

If there were any tracks in the grass, she couldn't see them; the pasture inside the fence was thoroughly grazed and trampled. But as she approached the barn, she could tell even from out here that the animals were stirred up inside.

"You didn't see anything on the cameras earlier?" she murmured into the walkie-talkie.

"No, but it's not like I monitor it every minute. I'm going through footage now." David hesitated. "We could wait for morning, you know. You can come back into the house and we can deal with it by daylight."

Sarah shook her head, forgetting he couldn't see her. "I couldn't relax knowing there might be someone out here. They might steal anything, even burn our house down."

"All right, but let me send the drone in to scout first."

"No problem," she muttered. The door was still bolted from the outside. _Could_ someone have gotten in? It was possible; they might've gone in through the hayloft, or through the door they used to collect eggs from the chickens. She and David were going to have to rethink their security arrangements. They'd gotten complacent, here in this relatively safe valley, forgetting how dangerous the world outside could be.

She unbolted and opened the door, leaned inside to turn on a light, and then stood back, to the side, as the drone hummed into the barn. There was a sudden snort, a thump and crash.

"David, stop! It's scaring the horses."

She followed it without waiting for his reply. They couldn't afford to lose any animals; they depended on them too much. There was the sound of crashing hooves from inside one of the stalls. "Hey, hey, settle down," Sarah murmured in the most soothing voice she had. "It's okay." David had pulled back the drone to the barn door, but the horses were still scared. Sarah wished she dared bring Leo out here. The kid was practically a horse whisperer; she was great with them. No matter how long Sarah lived out here, she still felt like a city girl at heart.

But the horses settled down eventually and let Sarah pet them through the slats of their stall doors. The walkie-talkie crackled just as she figured she had things under control. "Anything?"

"No. Shhh."

Sarah looked around. The only light in the barn came from bulbs near the main door. There was another light in the back that they didn't use much, but it was off right now -- she'd have to walk all the way down there to turn it on -- and the barn was full of shadows, a stark painting in light and dark.

She tried to decide if anything was out of place. There was so much _stuff_ in here. It just tended to accumulate. She'd never realized why farms often looked cluttered with old equipment and other junk until actually living on a farm herself. You found yourself hanging onto things, old buckets and blankets and pieces of harness, broken equipment that might be induced to work someday or scavenged for parts to fix other machines.

But it made the inside of the barn a labyrinth of places to hide.

She gave the horse one final pat and then stalked carefully and quietly through the barn, leading with the gun. She peeked into stalls, prodded piles of old saddle blankets and feed sacks with her foot.

By the time that movement finally came, where no movement should be, she had almost convinced herself that nothing was actually wrong, relaxing out of her state of keyed-up tension. There was a large pile of hay at the back of the barn, with some horse blankets draped on it. Sarah shoved a blanket out of the way with her foot, and then suddenly the entire heap of blankets shifted and moved and lurched toward her.

Sarah let out a yelp and scrambled backward, nearly falling on her ass. She pointed the rifle at the heap of blankets. Nothing was moving now, but she thought she could hear breathing, closer than the animals. Hard to tell, though. It was so _dark_ back here. She edged along the wall until she found the second light switch and snapped it on.

The back of the barn was flooded abruptly with bright white light from the halogen lamp that David used when he was working on equipment in bad weather. In the brighter light she could clearly see that the heap of old blankets wasn't just old blankets. There was a mud-crusted leg sticking out of it.

After a minute or two passed and nothing moved, she reached for the walkie-talkie. David wouldn't have heard any of that; the walkie-talkie only transmitted when the button was held down, and the drone was all the way over by the barn door, most likely too far away for its cameras to pick any of this up. The barn's one camera was at the front, and wouldn't have gotten it either.

"David," she said with a calm she didn't quite feel, "I think I found our intruder. There might be others. Bring the drone back here."

"Get back to the house, damn it," David said as soon as she let her finger off the button. The drone hummed up beside her.

"I can't just run off. This is our livelihood here."

"It doesn't matter if there's twelve of them and this is a decoy! I'm coming out there."

"No," she snapped back. "Stay with the kids, David."

He didn't argue, though she suspected he wanted to. But they both knew she was right. The situation had to be dealt with, or they might end up in the same situation as the Harper family, burned out of their home three years ago and forced to seek shelter with neighbors.

She started to prod the pile of blankets with her foot, then thought better of it and got a rake instead. From a rake-length away, with the rifle in the crook of her arm, she poked at the blankets and then hooked the rake on the top one and pulled it back.

Parts of a human figure were revealed: a shirt crusted with dark crud, the side of a bearded jaw and flashes of dirty, bloody skin; a man's narrow hip, a slash of corroded leather belt.

It could still be a trap, Sarah told herself. They'd never had it happen to them, but she'd heard of neighbors being tricked that way -- bandits pretending to be hurt and dying, begging for sympathy and water, then attacking, burning farms, killing people.

"Hey," she said, forcing her voice to be firm. "You." 

She leaned down to pull more of the horse blankets away, and then jumped back quickly, out of reach. The guy didn't even stir. That one burst of movement, when he'd lurched out of the hay and then fallen to the floor, seemed to have taken everything he had. 

If not for that, she would have thought he was dead. He might actually _be_ dead; that last burst of movement could have done him in. He looked awful. His shirt was a filthy rag, crusted with dried blood and gleaming wetly with fresh, and it looked like part of it had burnt. She couldn't even tell what color it was, and his jeans were in the same sorry state. What she could see of his face was bruised, filthy, and gaunt. The bones stood out sharply in the wrists protruding from the dirty cuffs of his sleeves. His feet, she was shocked to see, were bare, wrapped only in strips of filthy fabric most likely cut from his shirt.

But he was a survivor, and a well-armed one. There was a large knife at his belt with a leather-wrapped grip, stained dark with use, another knife at the small of his back, and two handguns of different sizes in a pair of holsters, one on each side. He had the leather strap of a satchel across his shoulder, though the deflated bag looked mostly empty. 

"Hey," Sarah said again. "Buddy. Are you alive?"

She prodded him with her foot, and thought she felt something give underneath the rags of his bloody shirt. Broken ribs, she thought, and her stomach twisted. If this was a trap, then his injuries, at least, weren't faked. Someone had beaten this guy nearly to death. 

She crouched down and slung the rifle across her back to free her hands.

"Be careful," David said tensely on the walkie-talkie.

Sarah didn't see any point responding. She was very aware of the drone hovering just above her shoulder, with all its lethal accompaniments, and hoped that David had the restraint not to unleash anything prematurely.

She also hoped this guy wasn't carrying any diseases. At this point the epidemics had burned themselves out, and he didn't have any obvious signs of sickness, no sores or rashes. The days when enclaves of survivors like the ones in the valley had driven away strangers out of fear of contagion were several years behind them now. But there was no telling where this guy had come from, what he had fled.

If he was contaminated with something, then it was already too late, she told herself. And _she_ wasn't going to be the kind of person who drove away someone who needed help out of fear. That wasn't the kind of person she wanted to bring up her children to be.

That still didn't mean she intended to allow an armed stranger around the place. She struggled with his belt buckle -- it was stiff, sealed into place with dirt, and she thought it was likely that he slept with his weapons on, which probably said a lot about the life he'd been living. Finally she got it off, the belt's ancient leather crackling with dirt and dried blood.

Sarah laid the belt and satchel on a horse blanket. She checked each gun's load and found them both empty. There were a couple of small pouches on his belt, but those were empty as well.

"Out of bullets, out of food," she murmured. At this time of year, even a skilled woodsman would have difficulty finding food in the woods -- and their part of the woods was much lusher than the wastelands to the south and west. "Even lost your boots. You're not having a good time, are you, friend?"

Now that she'd disarmed him, this left her with a quandary: keep him in the barn, or bring him into the house? Barn was probably safer, for a lot of reasons, but the house was easier -- better light, all the first-aid supplies, warm running water thanks to David's constant tinkering with the household amenities. And she would have David there to back her up if things went wrong. Contamination was still an issue, but unless she planned to quarantine herself and the entire barn, there was no point in worrying about it.

"David," she said, picking up the walkie-talkie again. "I'm bringing him into the house."

"Do you think that's a good idea?"

"Probably not, but I don't like the idea of playing doctor out here, if I don't have to." They'd been stuck in that situation with sick animals before, but she would far rather be in the house, with the door bolted and all of David's various security toys keeping them safe.

"All right," David said after a minute. "Let's do that. Can you move him?"

"Guess I'm going to have to."

The guy wasn't light, but he was lighter than he looked, all wiry muscle and bone. Sarah hung the rifle under her arm, crouched, and slung him over the shoulders, the way she'd had to do last winter with a lost calf out in the woods. Getting to her feet took all her strength, and she staggered under his weight, but she could do it. 

It was times like these that she was hit with a visceral awareness of just how far she'd come from her old life, how much she'd changed. She couldn't even imagine Sarah Lieberman of a decade ago, the liberal arts student and office worker, carrying a full-grown man across her shoulders, plus a gun. But here she was.

At the door of the barn, she nearly ran into David. "What are you doing here?" she panted.

"Backing you up." 

He carried one of the shotguns, and reached for the rifle, which was getting tangled up with her arm as she tried to keep a grip on the man slung over her shoulders. Sarah extended her arm so the strap could slide off her shoulder, and let David take it. 

It was a little easier now that she could use both hands to stabilize the stranger over her shoulders ... easier in the way that climbing a hill in waist-deep snow was easier than climbing a hill in chin-deep snow, maybe. She stumbled toward the house, wobbling under the weight. She was dimly aware that David wasn't behind her, but couldn't spare the attention to look back and see what he was doing. Somewhere alongside her, the drone hummed. She didn't even know how she made it up the porch steps, and she hadn't figured out how she was going to open the door when it opened for her anyway.

"Mom!" Leo said. "What's going on? Where's Dad? Who's _that?"_

"Out ... of the way," Sarah gasped. She caught a glimpse of Zach too, but she couldn't get more than passing glances of them around the hair hanging in her face that had worked its way out of her braid; she didn't have a hand free to brush it back. She wobbled through the kitchen, bashed the stranger's legs on the kitchen doorframe and nearly knocked over a lamp before she made it, finally, to the couch. She lowered him, or more like dropped him, and then stood with her hands on her knees before she managed to say, "You kids are supposed to be in bed."

"But I couldn't sleep because there was obviously something going on, and the lights were on in the barn, and I heard Dad talking to you ..." 

"Where _is_ Dad?" Zach asked.

"Barn," Sarah gasped. At least she hoped that's where he was. "And stay back," she added, swiping her hair away from her eyes with the back of her hand. "We don't know where this guy's been, what's wrong with him, or what he might have come into contact with. I'm taking a risk bringing him into the house, but there's no help for it. You two, though -- stay away. If you want to help," she added, realizing that giving them something to do would get them out from underfoot, "Leo, get me the first-aid kit and some warm water. Zach, bring me some blankets and some of your dad's extra clothes."

David came in just then, through the front door, which he carefully locked behind him. "Barn's shut up again. I can't find any sign that this guy had friends with him." He left the rifle at the door, shut down the drone and put it on a shelf, and came over to Sarah with the shotgun at his side. "Do you want me to, uh -- help you out here?"

"Have you gotten any better with blood since Bessie cut her leg on the barbed wire?"

"Well ... no," he said, taking a step back.

"One of us needs to stay armed while the other does this. And I've already got his blood on me."

David nodded. His hand twitched on the gun.

Zach came pattering downstairs with an armload of blankets and clothes, just as Leo came back from the kitchen with a bowl of water and the first-aid kit slung over her arm. "Kit" was a misnomer for the collection of first-aid supplies they'd cobbled together; it was a large duffle, suitable for treating everything from minor childhood mishaps to stitching up gashes, treating broken arms, applying antibiotics, and even doing minor surgery if it came to that. There were no doctors anymore, no hospitals, no veterinarians. There was a sort of clinic some fifty miles away, run by two nurses using what scrounged supplies they could find, but Sarah couldn't even imagine safely getting there with someone who was badly injured enough to need it, not over bandit-infested roads with horses as their only means of transportation.

"What now, Mom?" Leo asked, setting down the pan of water carefully.

Sarah considered telling them to go back upstairs, but it was probably useless.

"Now you get behind me, out of my line of fire," David said, "and fetch things for your mother if she asks, and stay away from that guy, okay?"

There was a disappointed chorus of "Yes, Dad," and they retreated to David's side of the room, where Sarah was vaguely aware of them standing on tiptoe and trying to get a better look.

She washed her hands and put on gloves -- probably useless now, but she may as well try. "Leo," she said over her shoulder, "get the first-aid books, please. We might need them."

Leo scampered off to do that, and Sarah began to peel off the stranger's stuck-on, burned-on shirt. She couldn't even wrap her mind around what she was looking at. Injury upon injury, layered on, as if he never even got enough time to heal from one disaster before another happened to him. There were old half-healed scars; there were fresher burns down his side, seeping pus; there were very recent cuts and gouges, clotted with blood, as if he'd been in a knife fight. And someone had worked him over with their fists -- not just once, either. His face and torso were bruised in layers, fresh bruises and old ones. His ribs were almost black with bruising, and then the burns in addition to that.

She didn't know where to start with all of this. She wasn't a nurse or a paramedic. The worst thing she normally had to deal with was delivering animal babies and stitching up animals and kids after they'd cut themselves. For a moment she just froze, paralyzed by the fear of doing something wrong.

Then David said quietly, "Honey?" and she snapped out of it.

"I'm all right," she said, to herself as much as to him, and then, "thanks," to Leo, who was just coming back with a stack of books. 

"Where do you want these, Mom?"

"Nowhere, yet. Or, I should say, over there. I want you and Zach to look up -- uh -- burns. And broken ribs. I need to know how to treat this."

"Are his _ribs broken?"_ Zach asked, wide-eyed. "Can I see?"

"You heard your mother," David told him. "Go help your sister. Anything I can do?"

"You're doing it." Just having him there at her back, as steady as David knew how to be, steadied her too.

The kids were soon on the floor surrounded by open books, while Sarah slowly and methodically checked the stranger, through dirt and blood and other filth, for any pressingly life-threatening injuries; it was the only way she could think of to triage his many hurts. There were dog tags around his neck; FRANK CASTLE was the name on the tags. Sarah wondered if it was his name, a friend's name, or if there was a different story behind the dog tags entirely. She decided to think of him as Frank, because it was easier than having no name for him at all. There was also a chain around his neck with a wedding ring on it. She left that beside the dog tags; it was none of her business.

She carefully stripped off the rags wound around his feet. All in all, his feet were kind of a mess, but not as bad as she would've expected for someone who'd been walking barefoot through the woods -- cut and bruised, but not destroyed. 

_You've had a hell of a time lately, haven't you, fella?_

One leg of his jeans was matted with blood and charred from whatever had burned him. "Scissors," she said, holding out a hand, and there was movement beside her, then David laid the kitchen shears in her hand. She cut off Frank's jeans at the upper thigh and pulled the ragged fabric away from a deep gash, clotted with old blood. There were burns down the side of his leg.

The water in the bowl turned filthy and dark, until she sent Leo to the kitchen to empty and refill it. The thought occurred to her, but she kept it to herself, that she didn't think all this blood was his. There was too much of it, and in the wrong places.

At least she was pretty sure he wasn't going to murder them in their beds -- not tonight, anyway. Not a guy in this kind of shape. Even aside from the injuries, he was, as she'd noticed in the barn, painfully thin, without a scrap of extra flesh on him anywhere.

But he'd had enough strength to crawl under their fence and get into the barn, she reminded herself. And enough presence of mind to hide the signs that he'd been there. If not for David's security setup and both of their mutual caution, they might have never known he was there.

 _Definitely going to be taking a close look at our security arrangements._ David was probably already making plans to expand the camera coverage, if she knew him.

"Mom?" Leo said. "Do you want me to read the stuff about burns now?"

"Yes, please tell me what --"

Frank came awake in a sudden burst of motion. One instant he was limp and still; then the bloody cloth was flying out of Sarah's hand, and she tumbled backward, upsetting the bowl of water, as she was borne down to the floor with one of Frank's hands at her throat and the other locked onto her wrist. She was too shocked to resist, partly at the sudden violence and partly because she couldn't believe anyone who looked the way he did could be so strong.

"Get off her or I'm going to kill you."

She'd only heard that tone in David's voice a few times, and only in the early, bad years, during their flight from the city and the time immediately after that. Past Frank's face, past the feverish, panicked eyes staring into hers, she saw David with the muzzle of his shotgun pressed into Frank's naked back. David's face was set and cold. 

There was no sound at all from the kids. Nobody said anything. Sarah's heart thumped in her ears, and Frank's harsh breathing seemed very loud. She could feel him trembling, filthy and wiry and half-naked as he was. His weight pinned her down, but she still had one hand free. She thought crazily of trying to grab the scissors or the bag of first-aid gear. But she didn't think she could fight him. He'd flattened her effortlessly, and it wasn't just the element of surprise, though it had helped. This was a guy who knew how to fight. Fighting, she thought, looking up at those dazed eyes staring back at her, might be all he knew how to do.

"We're not going to hurt you." Her voice emerged as a rasp. He wasn't holding her hard enough to cut off her air, but his hand was locked around her throat, enough to make it difficult to get words out.

"I am _absolutely_ going to hurt you if you don't get off my wife," David snarled. "Kids, go upstairs, get in Leo's bedroom, and lock the door."

There were kids' feet pounding on the stairs, but she heard it only distantly. All her attention was on Frank's face, and so she saw the moment when irrational panic gave way to a kind of startled rationality and shocked guilt. His hand lifted off her throat, he started to sit back, and then David cracked him in the head with the butt of the shotgun.

"David!" she gasped as Frank went sprawling sideways.

David leaned down to scoop her up by the arm and dragged her backward, the muzzle of the shotgun flailing around wildly.

"David -- no -- David --" She struggled to get loose and ended up in an odd, awkward tussle with David, who let go almost immediately and then turned to put himself and the shotgun between her and the stranger.

Frank wasn't doing anything except lying there on the floor, rubbing his head. He made a noise, a hoarse rasp, and then got words out -- hoarse, clumsy words, like he hadn't spoken in a long while. "Sorry. Not gonna hurt you. Sorry, ma'am. Really sorry."

"Yeah, you got a funny way of thanking people for helping them, pal," David snapped. "Sarah, hon? You okay?"

"I'm okay." She managed to get it out in a mostly normal-sounding voice. She _wasn't_ okay; her throat hurt, so did her wrist, and she could still feel the impression of Frank's shockingly strong fingers in both places, as well as his knee on her chest. She was going to have bruises. But the last thing she wanted right now was to give David more reason to pull the trigger. "David, I don't think he meant to do that. It was an accident."

"You almost strangled my wife. That was an accident?"

"Sorry," Frank whispered. "Sorry, ma'am."

Sarah managed to stand up on slightly wobbly legs. "David. It's okay. I don't think he knew what he was doing."

"That doesn't make it _okay,"_ David muttered, but when she put her hand on the shotgun and pushed it down, he didn't try to stop her.

Frank pulled himself up to a sitting position with his back propped against the couch; it took several tries. He had his hand pressed against the side of his head, and Sarah saw fresh blood on his fingers. 

"My guns," Frank said dazedly. He touched his side, jerked his hand away. "My stuff. My things -- where are --"

"We've got them," Sarah said quickly, because he was starting to look tense again, and David was getting tense; the shotgun was back up, pointing at Frank. "They're in a safe place, but we have kids in the house, we couldn't let you in here with weapons."

Frank just looked at both of them, not hostile but not friendly either, a flat dark look. Just because he hadn't meant to hurt her didn't make him not dangerous; David wasn't wrong about that.

"I'm going to get a clean bowl of water, okay?" Telegraphing every movement, she bent down and picked up the overturned bowl, carefully staying out of David's line of fire. She went into the kitchen swiftly, and as soon as she was out of sight of both men, she leaned against the wall and let herself shake. Tentatively she touched her throat, where soreness still girdled her neck. Her fingers were trembling.

"Mom?" a quiet voice asked from the doorway.

Sarah jumped and jerked her hand down. Leo and Zach must have come down the back stairs; they were huddled in the doorway with Leo holding --

"Give me that," Sarah snapped, and took the .22 rifle away from her. Leo relinquished it meekly. "What have I told you about guns in the house?"

"Dad --"

"-- Is an adult, and can make decisions like that. If I ever see you do anything so irresponsible again, no more target practice for a month. For a _year."_

"We were trying to help," Zach protested. He was clutching a baseball bat. "That guy --"

"-- Is with your father. Put that back where it belongs. Both of you go back upstairs."

"But --" they both protested. 

"Upstairs! Now!"

She waited until she heard their feet on the stairs before she blew out a breath and closed her eyes for a moment, trying to make the trembling stop. She couldn't deal with the kids and with her own adrenaline crash at the same time. When her hands were no longer shaking so badly, she filled the bowl, reflexively checked all the locks because it made her feel better, and went back to the living room.

Nobody had moved much since she'd been gone. Frank, if that was his name, was still sitting on the floor, one hand pressed to his head and the other on the floor. David stood a few feet away with the gun pointed at him.

"Listen," Frank was saying in his low, raspy voice when she came back in. He looked spooked, eyes darting around the room, and Sarah couldn't help noticing that his hand was only inches from the scissors. "I'm alone. No gang. No plans to rob you. Just need my guns and I'll be out of your hair."

"Yeah, well, I don't think you're in a position to make demands, and I'm also not sure you can even walk out that door right now."

"I can," Frank said, and then he didn't say anything else, staring at the floor.

Sarah caught David's eye, waited for his nod, then crossed the floor to Frank. She noticed David growing tenser the closer she got, and she didn't blame him; she was pretty tense, too, by the time she crouched down next to Frank.

Up close, she could see how much effort it was costing him to remain upright. He was shivering, which made her realize that it wasn't that warm in the house and he was wearing nothing at the moment but the remains of his cut-up jeans. His blank gaze rested on the floor, except for those moments when he seemed to come back to himself and looked around sharply before zoning out again.

"Is your name Frank?"

He jerked all over, a sharp flinch. "How do you know that?"

"Your dog tags." She made a small gesture toward them.

"Oh," he said after a moment. He did another of those searching 'round-the-room looks, lingering on David's shotgun, and then suddenly pulled his hand away from the scissors. She knew what he'd been thinking, and that he'd decided not to do it.

She hoped David hadn't noticed.

"Frank, I'm Sarah, and this is my husband David. I'm going to clean you up, okay? Some of this might be infected. We're going to help you."

"Okay," he said in that same slow way, as if he'd simply hit a breaking point when he wasn't going to fight anymore, wasn't going to resist or think or do anything but sit there.

She dipped a clean cloth into the water, hesitated briefly, and then started gently mopping at the burns on his side. He flinched when she first touched him, and she paused before continuing, but he didn't relax and she wasn't even sure how much of the pain he was aware of. It was mostly just shock at being touched. He was so tense his muscles were knotted like cordwood. 

"How did you do this to yourself?" she asked, rinsing out the rag before lightly dabbing at his injuries again. 

No answer.

"Where are you from, Frank?" David asked, speaking up.

Sarah thought Frank might not have heard, but then he said in a low voice, "A few places."

David huffed out a short laugh. "You know, we're trying to help you. You don't have to keep being a dick about it."

"David," Sarah sighed.

"What? Look, the least he could do is answer a few questions. What are you doing here?"

"Traveling," Frank said after a minute.

"Yeah, we hadn't figured that part out."

" _David."_

" _What?"_ David said, exasperated. "He comes here, breaks into our farm, attacks us --"

Frank jerked away from Sarah. He gripped the arm of the couch and levered himself to his bruised, cut-up feet, and stood swaying. David's gun swung to follow him.

Sarah stood up as well. "Frank, you don't have to leave."

"Hey." David looked distressed as well as angry. "I'm not trying to chase you out. I'm trying to protect my family, man."

"I know." Frank ground it out, looking everywhere but at them. "I get it. I'd do the same. I'm gonna go, that's all."

Sarah started to reach for his arm and then, thinking of his lightning-fast reflexes from earlier, stopped herself. "Do you want anything to take with you? Food? Shoes?"

His gaze did another quick circuit of the room before he said, low and fast, "I can't pay you, ma'am."

"I didn't say anything about payment."

He looked at her, the first time he'd met her eyes since that initial moment when he had her flat on the floor with his hand on her throat. There was something there -- gratitude, confusion, a kind of baffled warmth. 

And then his eyes glazed and fluttered shut, and he keeled over.

Sarah. moving on instinct, caught him as he fell. His weight bore them both down to the floor. She looked down at Frank's bruised, slack face, then looked up helplessly at David. 

For a minute David just stood there, staring at both of them with a bemused expression. Then he sighed and leaned the shotgun against the wall, and helped her get Frank back onto the couch.

"This is a mistake," David said, mostly to himself as he lowered Frank's feet onto the couch with gentleness that belied the words.

"Maybe. But we'd want someone to do it for us, wouldn't we?"

"Yeah," David sighed. 

They worked in tandem, David handing her supplies while she swiftly cleaned and dressed Frank's wounds. It was easier now that he'd passed out again and she didn't have to worry about hurting him. When she was done, David helped lift him while Sarah got him into some of David's sweats and pulled a pair of wool socks over his damaged feet, and then she draped a blanket over him.

"I'm impressed the kids have stayed up there the whole time," she said, glancing at the ceiling. She had occasionally heard creaking as if they were moving around up there, but neither of them had showed up downstairs.

"I heard you yelling at them in the kitchen. Guess you put the fear of Mom into them."

She grinned and rolled her eyes. "I'd better go up and reassure them. Or you could do it while I clean up down here."

"You go on. I think they're going to want to see you."

Sarah went quietly up the stairs. "Kids?" Zach wasn't in his room, and the door to Leo's room was shut. When she knocked, it opened a crack, and Leo peeked out, with Zach behind her.

"I'm sorry I yelled at you earlier."

"I know why, Mom." Sometimes Leo looked like a miniature adult, serious and wise beyond her years. But then the facade of adulthood cracked, and Sarah saw, to her distress, that both kids had been crying. "Did that man hurt you, Mom? Is he going to hurt us?"

"No. No, honey." She took them both in her arms. "He's just sick and scared. He didn't know what he was doing." At least, she was banking on it. She'd seen the look in his eyes; she'd seen that he wasn't seeing _her_ , he was seeing other threats from his past. And he'd been sorry as soon as he realized what he'd done.

"I want to sleep with Leo tonight, Mom," Zach sniffled into her shoulder.

"That's fine. You can do that, if Leo's okay with it." For years, Zach had occasionally crept into Leo's bed at night when he was scared by nightmares. They hadn't done it for years, both of them considering themselves too mature, but if there ever was a night to revert to old habits, it was this one.

She got them safely tucked in again, delivered a final round of good-nights, and left quietly, closing Leo's door behind her. As she went downstairs, she heard rain start up on the roof, a soft drumming that came and went in waves.

The living room had been cleaned while she was upstairs, everything set back to rights. David was scrubbing bloody water from the carpet. She put an arm around his neck and dropped a kiss on top of his head.

"Glad you had my back tonight," she said quietly into his ear.

"Yeah, except for letting the half-crazy homeless guy almost strangle you." David glanced at the drone on its shelf. "I might need to set up some kind of automated defense --"

"David, no. Having strangers in the house has its problems, but having a battle drone shooting at people in my living room isn't going to make me feel better."

"How about if the drones run automated defense routines but stay outside?"

Sarah ran a hand through his hair. "We'll talk about it tomorrow."

"Fair enough."

She sat down beside him. Exhaustion was starting to settle into her bones. David put an arm around her and leaned his head against hers, and for a few minutes they just watched their guest sleep. The rain was falling more heavily now, rattling against the shutters.

"We can't just leave him down here unguarded," David said. 

"I know. We can take turns standing guard."

She felt David nod against her cheek. "We could put him back out in the barn, you know. He'd be okay there."

"I know." She looked back at the man on the couch, the vulnerability of his bruised, sleeping face. "It just doesn't feel right. I don't think he's had anywhere safe to sleep for a long time, David. He deserves a couch for a night."

"Standing guard it is," David sighed. "Think we should tie him to something?"

"I don't think either of us wants him _even more_ panicked when he wakes up, do we?"

"True," he admitted.

Sarah blew out a breath and looked, again, at the sleeping stranger on their couch. "What have we gotten ourselves into?"

 

***

 

Frank woke in the way he'd grown accustomed to waking, with a sudden all-over jerk, going from dead asleep to awake and sitting up in a jolt of adrenaline. 

This time he found himself grappling with someone -- or no, some _thing_ : he was tangled in a blanket. He got a hand free, reached for his knife and found it wasn't there --

"Are you done?" said a voice that was half-amused, half-annoyed.

Frank whipped around; it sent him into a head rush that blacked his vision for an instant. He came back to himself with one hand clutching the arm of the couch for stability, his other hand where his knife wasn't, and a scruffy stranger facing him.

No ... not a stranger, not entirely. It was the woman's husband. Frank grasped for their names. Sarah ... David. Yeah, that was it.

"Hi there," David said. He was sitting on a straight-backed kitchen chair on the other side of the room, with the shotgun across his knees. The way he was holding it, looked like he'd had it up and pointed at Frank a second ago, and now it was lowered back down.

Frank stayed where he was, heart thumping, letting the world rearrange itself and fall back into place. He only had fragmentary snatches of memory from tonight. The woman doing something that hurt him. David pointing a gun at him. But Frank didn't hold it against him. Man was protecting his family. Frank would've done the same. Hell, if Frank were in David's shoes and someone like Frank showed up on his farm, Frank probably would've shot him without asking questions.

David cleared his throat. "When someone says hi, most people say hi back."

"Not used to being around people," Frank said after a minute, when the words had sorted themselves out.

"Yeah," David said. "I figured that part out. Where are you from? I mean, where were you most recently? And the reason why I ask _that,_ " he added, "is not to pry into your business, but to decide how dangerous you are."

"I'm dangerous," Frank said. The words stuck in his throat.

"Yeah. I know." David smiled then, suddenly -- not a wide smile, but a little of one. "Humor me."

"West," Frank said. "I come from the west."

David studied him, his gaze sharp and thoughtful. Soft, Frank thought, but not stupid, and not a pushover. "There's not much out west except wasteland," David said. "At least that's what people say."

"They're not wrong."

David waited, clearly expecting more, but Frank volunteered nothing. After a little while, David shook his head. "You want anything? Drink of water, maybe?"

His throat tightened with thirst. "Yeah. Thanks."

David got up, slinging the shotgun strap over his shoulder, and went into the kitchen. He came back with a glass and a pitcher. Frank tried not to notice how badly his own hands were shaking when he took it; he had to use both of them to hold it. He drained the glass, and David refilled it and then sat on the arm of the couch and watched him.

Soft, Frank thought, but not stupid -- and not soft where it counted, either. He thought David was fully capable of pulling that trigger, if Frank gave him a reason.

"Brought you something else." David held out a hand with a couple pills in the palm. Frank looked at that, and at him, and didn't take it. "Come on, man. It's just Tylenol. You remember Tylenol, right?"

At this point he was so used to hurting that he hardly noticed it, but what the hell did he have to lose? He washed the pills down with more water. Clean water, and lots of it, was one of the many luxuries he hadn't had lately.

"How'd you get burned?" David asked.

"There was a fire."

"Yeah," David said wryly. "I figured."

Frank wet his lips. These people had helped him, even if they had their own motives. He owed them some answers. "Bandits. Burned a place. Killed some people. I tried to help. Didn't work out like I hoped." He decided not to mention he had hunted them down and taken care of the problem. Probably not the sort of things a nice family wanted to hear about.

"And what about your shoes, boots, whatever? Don't tell me you ran around barefoot all winter."

"Gave 'em to someone who needed 'em more than I did."

David waited, seemingly expecting more, then sighed. "You're not much of a talker, are you?"

"Told you. Not used to --"

"Being around people, yeah, I get it."

Frank started to make a move to get up, saw David's hands twitch on the gun. "Bathroom," he explained, and then gave it another try. His feet refused to take his weight, the dull ache flaring up into sudden agony. He sat down abruptly, jarring his ribs agonizingly, waited out the head rush and gathered for another try.

"Right," David muttered. He got off the arm of the couch. "Gimme your arm."

"I don't need --" Frank began.

"No, of course not." David put his free arm under Frank's armpits and hauled him to his feet. It was sudden, matter-of-fact, and didn't really give him time to pull away.

He couldn't help thinking, as he leaned heavily on David's shoulder and tried not to flinch away from the soles of his feet making contact with the floor, that he could easily take the shotgun away if he wanted to. He was hurt, but not too hurt to throw David to the floor and disarm him.

Trusting, these two. Too damn trusting. He ought to do it. Show them not to trust every goddamn stranger who showed up at their door. It was the kind of life lesson that might save them in the future. Only thing he really had to give them.

But he didn't, and then David was letting him go at the door of the bathroom. Frank caught at the doorframe, dimly aware that David had been talking on their slow journey across the floor, but Frank hadn't registered any of the words.

"You, uh, need any help in there?" David asked, sounding like he really hoped no help would be needed.

Frank grunted and shut the door.

It'd been years since he'd been in a real bathroom. He reached automatically for the light switch without thinking about it, was startled when the light actually came on. And there it was, a typical bathroom with all the modern conveniences: bathtub, toilet, sink. Everything clean yet slightly cluttered in that lived-in way, hairbrushes and plastic bottles of shampoo sitting side-by-side with homemade soaps and lotions in glass jars on the back of the sink and the rim of the tub. The toilet was clean, with water in the bowl, and when he flushed, it worked. Somewhere under the house, he heard a pump kick on.

Hell. They had themselves a nice little piece of suburbia out here. Years since he'd seen anything like it.

And it was only a matter of time before someone came along and took it away from them at gunpoint. These people were far too nice. Too trusting.

Too ... everything he wasn't anymore.

He used the toilet, washed his hands, and splashed water on his face. It was hard to get over the magic of having warm water come out of the tap when he turned it on. Such a simple, small thing, but it almost made tears come to his eyes. He hadn't realized he'd missed it.

He sat down on the toilet lid, just sat there for a minute getting some strength back, then picked up first one foot, then the other, stripping off the socks to test their condition with gingerly presses of his thumb. Cut and bruised, but the damage didn't run deep. Nothing was broken. He could walk on these.

He started to pull the socks back on, then hesitated. These hand-knitted socks of thick multicolored wool -- he'd never seen them before. In fact ... these weren't his clothes. He looked down at a pair of ill-fitting sweat pants, pulled on over the remainder of his tattered jeans, and a sweatshirt that was too loose around the ribs and too long in the arms.

These _people._ Goddamn.

There was a sharp tap on the door. "You okay in there?" David's voice said through the door.

"Fine!" Frank barked back at him. Talking still hurt his throat, but a little less so after the water.

He sat there for a little while, just resting, getting a little strength back. The bathroom had a small window, not big enough to climb out of. It was raining out there -- he gradually became aware of it, the steady dripping of water off the window frame and the patter against the side of the house when the wind changed.

He really didn't want to go out there.

He also needed his gear back. The woman had said, or maybe her husband had said, they'd put it somewhere. Not as trusting as all that, maybe. Maybe they didn't plan on letting him go.

He looked around the sink, found a pair of small scissors, only thing in here that had an edge to it. He tucked it down the back of the sweatpants' waistband. Then he flicked off the light and opened the door.

The living room, now that he was noticing the finer details, was mostly dark, lit only by a lamp near the couch. He looked around for David, but saw the woman instead. Sarah. She was sitting in the chair where David had been, the shotgun leaning against the wall beside her. When she saw him, she got up quickly, started to reach for the gun, then left it where it was.

"My husband went to bed," she said. "We're taking turns. Do you need help?"

Frank shook his head. He walked across the room to the couch and was pretty sure he'd managed to hide how unstable he still was. He sat down carefully. Let her think it was because of the ribs, not because he was so dizzy he could barely stay upright.

Sarah took a step back, one hand drifting toward the shotgun again; then it dropped.

Good cop, bad cop? Frank thought. She gets to be the trusting one, David plays the heavy -- no. Hard to say.

"I can get you something to eat," Sarah said. "There are leftovers in the kitchen. I could make you a sandwich or -- no -- if you haven't eaten in awhile, soup might be better. Do you want me to heat some up for you?"

He wasn't exactly hungry, though he knew he should be. He also wasn't sure he wanted to accept any more of their help, not without knowing what they were planning. He grunted a noncommittal response.

"I, um ... okay. I'll do that." She picked up the shotgun and took it into the kitchen with her.

Now would be the time to leave, Frank thought. Just go out that door. If these people were trying to hold him prisoner, they were the world's worst hostage takers. He was already standing up before common sense asserted itself. He still didn't have his gear. How long would he last with nothing but a pair of scissors to defend himself? Maybe he could steal a horse -- he didn't like that, but he could do it if he had to. Take some things from the barn, maybe. Tools. Animal feed. Man could live on animal feed; it was better than no food at all.

Sarah poked her head in from the kitchen. "Do you drink coffee?"

"You have coffee?" It came out involuntarily. He hadn't realized anyone had coffee anymore.

"Don't get your hopes too high." There was a soft laugh in her voice. "We've only got a little of the real stuff left, and we save it for special occasions. This is made out of roasted roots from a recipe Leo -- that's my daughter -- found in one of her wilderness-survival books, with a little bit of leftover used-up grounds to help with the flavor. It's not very coffee-like, but it'll be hot, at least."

"Yeah," he said after a minute. "Yes, ma'am, that'd be nice."

She smiled at him and withdrew into the kitchen.

He didn't understand these people at all. But he sat back down on the couch.

He was still sitting on the couch, hands dangling between his knees, thinking about leaving, when Sarah came back from the kitchen with a bowl, a spoon, and a steaming cup. The shotgun was now slung on her back. She set the bowl and cup on the end table beside the couch.

"There's a folding TV tray around here somewhere. Let me see if I can find it. The kids use it sometimes when we watch TV."

"You watch _TV?"_ He hadn't even noticed there was one in the living room, but there it was, in the corner, so normal his eyes had gone right over it. But not normal. Not anymore.

"Well, DVDs." She looked over her shoulder with a smile as she rummaged in the closet. "We have electricity and we have a TV; why not use it?"

Why not, indeed. He found himself thinking, as she unfolded the TV tray in front of him, that most people he'd met in the last few years had stopped thinking like that. Most people had left those things behind in the before-time. He thought of those squatters in the cabin with the baby. They loved each other, and they did the things that people do, including entertaining themselves in the evening with storytelling in the brief span of time that they found energy for those things, by the light of a fire that was the only light they had. They were people: they lived and loved and survived.

He remembered the burning embers of the cabin. Made himself stop thinking about it.

But Sarah and David were not just getting by, but making their place _nice._ Holding onto the things they wanted to keep from Before, including things that were pleasant and beautiful, not just useful and necessary.

It made him wonder how many other people like them were still in the world. Made him think about the little settlements he'd passed occasionally, giving a wide berth because of bad experiences in the wastelands. Towns, he'd found, did not like strangers coming around. Showing up in a strange town was a good way to get pressed into involuntary service in their mines, or blamed for whatever crimes they needed someone to blame for, or simply driven off at gunpoint because they had only enough food for the people living within their walls.

But maybe it wasn't like that everywhere. Maybe there were towns where people still did the things they used to do in the old days -- where they had schools and stores, where they had electricity and running water, and things like DVDs and books.

Maybe the old world wasn't as gone as he'd believed.

And maybe, he thought, watching from the corner of his eye as Sarah went back to her chair and settled the shotgun in her lap ... maybe thinking that way was a good way to get killed. Because maybe this slice of happy rural utopia that Sarah and David had carved out of the wilderness was covering up something as vile as he'd seen in those towns where they sacrificed children to local warlords, or the starving people by the poison lake who'd tried to eat him.

The world was a cruel, harsh place, and every time he'd forgotten that, it seemed, it had found a way to savage him for it.

Wordlessly, he reached for his bowl of soup. He didn't think it was poisoned or drugged, wouldn't quite put it past her to try ... but the smell was making him hungry, a little, for the first time in a long time.

 

***

 

After the stranger had eaten half a bowl of soup and drank most of a cup of that goddawful chicory coffee that Leo had taught them to make, he was clearly flagging, and Sarah waited until he'd fallen asleep before she got up again. She covered him with a blanket and took the dishes into the kitchen. And then she checked the locks on all the doors one more time from pure instinct, and carried the shotgun upstairs. She checked on the kids, again by habit -- both of them asleep, curled up together in Leo's bed like a couple of puppies -- and then she slipped off her shoes in the bedroom and left the shotgun beside the bed before she crawled in with David.

David stirred sleepily and rolled over, then half sat up. Sarah pulled him back down.

"Is he --"

"He's still down there. I fed him and he's asleep again."

"Sarah ..."

"No, listen. I feel ridiculous, sitting on a chair all night. And then you and I will both end up dragging ourselves through a busy day on the farm with next to no sleep, and for what? You've got the security system set to alert us if any of the doors are opened as usual, right?"

"Yes," he said, waking up a little more, "but, Sarah --"

"If he plans to rob and hurt us, David, he's not that much less likely to do it if one of us is sitting there with a gun. You know that he probably could."

Silence from David's side of the bed, and then his arm slipped around her, pulling her close.

"We've worked so hard here," he murmured. "To be _safe._ To keep the kids safe."

"I know. And _you_ know I wouldn't do anything to endanger the kids. Never. We've had houseguests before; we even let the Harpers stay with us all winter that time when they were burned out of their homestead. What's different about this?"

"What's different is that we _knew_ the Harpers, and it's one thing giving shelter to someone who's been vouched for by someone else in the valley. This guy, Sarah ..."

"I know," she sighed, and leaned into him. "But I just feel like at some point, you have to either trust or --"

She stopped talking at the creak of steps below. They were both quiet. A door closed. The toilet flushed. The bathroom door opened again. A little more creaking, the sound of running water, then silence.

Sarah hesitated and then carefully slid out of bed. She picked up the shotgun and went to the bedroom door, hearing David's soft steps behind her.

They both looked down from the top of the stairs to Frank, back on the couch with a blanket over him.

"It's not that I trust him, exactly," Sarah whispered when they were back in bed. "I know better than that. It's just that I don't think he's going to rob us and burn our house down _tonight._ There's no reason for him to. Where's he going to go? It's pouring rain out there."

David stroked his hand back and forth, back and forth across her shoulder. "Well, I keep saying I married a smart woman. I'd be a stupid man if I ignored your advice then, wouldn't I?"

"You better believe it."

Despite her assurances to David, she still lay awake for a long time, listening in the dark for the sound of movement from downstairs. Of the door opening, perhaps, and their unexpected houseguest slipping off into the night, never to return.

But no sound came except the drumming of the rain on the roof, and when she finally fell asleep, it was with a strange, deep confidence that he was still going to be there in the morning.


End file.
